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Amazon CEO says AI agents will soon reduce company's corporate workforce

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Re: Amazon CEO says AI agents will soon reduce company's corporate workforce

#101

Post by jdgoesmarching »

crop_rotation wrote: post #82
JCM9 wrote: post #8

This headline is getting old and the story isn’t sticking with folks. They will do layoffs but because core business units are struggling and AWS has turned into a mess of disconnected services that are falling behind peers and they’re trying to clean up that bloated mess… not beside of “AI.” Amazon is also way behind tech peers on AI. These sorts of puff PR pieces don’t do much to shake that reality.

> Amazon is also way behind tech peers on AI. These sorts of puff PR pieces don’t do much to shake that reality. What tech peers is Amazon way behind on AI? Neither MSFT nor AAPL have their own models. FB has no path to model monetization. GOOG is unique but that's it, and AWS might be able to better capitalize on AWS enterprise customers. Amazon was way behind yes but at this point they are positioned well enough to…

“Behind on AI” isn’t exclusive to models. Azure is raking in money on OpenAI compute and has an entire product line built out in Copilot. I’m not going to argue for the quality of those offerings, but it’s clearly positioned much better for the street than Amazon is.

Google you’ve already covered, and Apple despite its faults has been designing and producing AI-targeted hardware for a decade and has a much clearer story for integrating AI into its lineup.

AWS has a scattered mess of Q-branded services and a consistent track record of shipping garbage enterprise apps like Workmail, Chime, Workdocs, Cognito, and arguably Quicksight. Bedrock APIs are frequently behind in features from their parent vendors, and Bedrock as a whole isn’t better than thousands of LLM management platforms that have already sprung up.

I’ll never fully bet against Amazon as the far and away cloud market leader, but their existing AI position is flimsy and their increasingly hostile position towards their workforce reeks of desperation.

Re: Amazon CEO says AI agents will soon reduce company's corporate workforce

#102

Post by sandspar »

pmg102 wrote: post #23
sandspar wrote: post #12

One thing I learned from COVID is that warnings never stick + once the wave hits it's MUCH larger than even the most dire warnings predicted. CEOs can warn about AI replacing jobs until they're blue in the face, but people won't listen. And when mass job losses finally arrive, people (including the CEOs) will be shocked and overwhelmed.

That was true for COVID but be careful not to overgeneralise. People also have historically warned about many things, with many of them never coming true. In fact, that is probably the reason that people unfortunately have learned not to listen. There's even a fable about it.

Thanks for the caution! That's good advice.

Although I do think that AI fits the pattern of "real big thing".

In general, cultural diffusion progresses in three stages: from insiders to money people to the public.

For example, great artists are recognized first by fellow artists and critics, then by art auctions, then by the broader public.

AI seems to be following a similar trajectory. AGI is felt first by insiders (AI researchers), then by money people (politicians and business leaders - we are here) then by the public (I'm guessing soon).

Re: Amazon CEO says AI agents will soon reduce company's corporate workforce

#103

Post by mips_avatar »

jdgoesmarching wrote: post #101
crop_rotation wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazon is also way behind tech peers on AI. These sorts of puff PR pieces don’t do much to shake that reality. What tech peers is Amazon way behind on AI? Neither MSFT nor AAPL have their own models. FB has no path to model monetization. GOOG is unique but that's it, and AWS might be able to better capitalize on AWS enterprise customers. Amazon was way behind yes but at this point they are positioned well enough to…

“Behind on AI” isn’t exclusive to models. Azure is raking in money on OpenAI compute and has an entire product line built out in Copilot. I’m not going to argue for the quality of those offerings, but it’s clearly positioned much better for the street than Amazon is. Google you’ve already covered, and Apple despite its faults has been designing and producing AI-targeted hardware for a decade and has a much clearer st…

I think the bear case for Azure is they're now just a GPU service provider for OpenAI. This is a business, but it's not a great business. None of their AI products are industry leaders, and nobody would pick copilot if given a choice. Microsoft can't reuse their Teams bundling strategy because the unit costs of copilot are so high. Like for real where is the actually functional powerpoint or excel agent? It's not coming because these products are so sclerotic that there's no interface inside of these codebases for a current gen AI agent to use and provide customer value. Microsoft made it's bed by chasing the next shiny object and having a culture of crushing individual employee agency years ago. Executives might think that layoffs can instill innovation through fear and grind, but that is so misguided.

Re: Amazon CEO says AI agents will soon reduce company's corporate workforce

#104

Post by mips_avatar »

daxfohl wrote: post #38

I don't really get it. If AI is a force multiplier that suddenly makes your workforce way more productive, wouldn't you actually want to increase the size of your workforce to reap the maximum benefit? There are only two reasons I can think not to. First, if AI can fully replace a human in a role. But it seems like we're a long way away from that. Second, if the added productivity leaves you with nothing to do. But w…

It's not a strategy it's a corporate PR spin. They're betting this will keep public markets happy for now.

People are out there building useful stuff with AI but they don't work at Amazon

Re: Amazon CEO says AI agents will soon reduce company's corporate workforce

#105

Post by owebmaster »

exabrial wrote: post #58

No they won’t lol. What’s actually happening is ceos are realizing that they don’t need to employ 100,000 JavaScript developers, there’s probably easier and better ways to solve the same problems… but yeah blaming ai sounds makes firing people a lot softer

They don't need it anymore because the tech and the customer base is built already. New companies will employ 100,00 javascript developers if that is what it takes to become trillion dollar companies.

Re: Amazon CEO says AI agents will soon reduce company's corporate workforce

#106

Post by owebmaster »

crop_rotation wrote: post #84
exabrial wrote: post #58

No they won’t lol. What’s actually happening is ceos are realizing that they don’t need to employ 100,000 JavaScript developers, there’s probably easier and better ways to solve the same problems… but yeah blaming ai sounds makes firing people a lot softer

You are totally correct. Most of big tech has way too many SWEs (which if good for society definitely), but I don't see that number surviving LLMs.

Can AI build Google? 100,000 developers can.

Re: Amazon CEO says AI agents will soon reduce company's corporate workforce

#107

Post by shmerl »

Finnucane wrote: post #72
shmerl wrote: post #40

Waiting for AI to reduce CEOs.

Are you sure all these C-suite guys aren't actually AI already? I doubt some of them would pass a Voigt-Kampff test.

Yeah, may be they already were replaced by AI?

Re: Amazon CEO says AI agents will soon reduce company's corporate workforce

#109

Post by const_cast »

hiddencost wrote: post #41
daxfohl wrote: post #38

I don't really get it. If AI is a force multiplier that suddenly makes your workforce way more productive, wouldn't you actually want to increase the size of your workforce to reap the maximum benefit? There are only two reasons I can think not to. First, if AI can fully replace a human in a role. But it seems like we're a long way away from that. Second, if the added productivity leaves you with nothing to do. But w…

Coordination costs in software are brutal. More companies with smaller workforces would be better than fewer companies with larger workforces.

This just moves the coordination costs elsewhere, because more companies = more software = more hops to get things done.

Now, instead of Employee A and B working together to solve Problem X, Company A's product and Company B's product must be used together to solve Problem X. At least the employees know each other and are in the same "white box". But software products are a blackbox, so the end result is almost certainly worse.

Re: Amazon CEO says AI agents will soon reduce company's corporate workforce

#110

Post by edanm »

simonw wrote: post #16

Because I continue to collect definitions of "agent", here's what Andy Jassy said in that memo: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-ceo-and... > Think of agents as software systems that use AI to perform tasks on behalf of users or other systems. Agents let you tell them what you want (often in natural language), and do things like scour the web (and various data sources) and summarize results, engag…

I appreciate you keeping up the fight for correct terminology! I think at this point though there is a "standard" definition of agent - an AI that can actually utilize external real-world tools to do things on behalf of users. That fits coding agents, web-using agents, etc.

Do you think there's still confusion around it like there was a year ago?

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